white modernist building lit up in the dark, tucked
away in a far corner of the Giardini. I ran to take cover. It featured an exhibit
called Places for People : a sparse but simply furnished
demonstration of real interventions rather than idealistic projections, describing
three projects that had worked with refugees to make modest but important
improvements to their emergency shelters. The ideas were a refreshing change from
the rest of the Biennale because they were so

on the
periphery of conflicts to the heart of them. Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Rwanda and the
entire Great Lakes region of Africa became particularly high-risk areas for aid
workers. It was during the intervention in Somalia in 1992 that the interface between
security, operational procedures and humanitarian principles became central for MdM.
The political and security climate at the time confined NGOs to urban centres across
Somalia, while the looting of humanitarian convoys

public-relations and
legal responses. More importantly, they can feed into and foster an anti-migrant climate and
increase mistrust towards NGOs and their interventions. In addition to these short-term consequences, disinformation may have a profound long-term
impact by undermining the trust that citizens place in all sources of information. Research
shows that audiences are confused and concerned about disinformation, and they struggle to know
which sources of news to trust. A 2018 Pew Centre study found that 42 per cent of Americans
believe

two means through which Europeans made themselves the protagonists of global
history. Europeans then rewrote their history, erasing the mass human suffering they had caused,
promoting instead tales of white European innocence ( Wekker,
2016 ), superiority and exceptionalism. In its destruction of life, coloniality might be
considered anti-humanitarian, and yet it is characteristic of the liberal humanitarianism whose
end we now (prematurely) are invited to mourn. For over two decades, I have been struggling to make sense of humanitarian interventions

community actors, classic figures of humanitarian work or development ( Olivier de Sardan, 2005 ): chiefs, women,
elders and youths seen as legitimate actors, able to both represent and influence
the ‘community’ – that is, to be intermediaries of community
engagement between the intervention and local populations. This article shows how
both the legitimacy of these actors embodying the response and eventually the
intervention itself was contested and negotiated through localised encounters. 1

about unintended consequences. Equally, there is a long history of how humanitarian
endeavours have played a role in sustaining or exacerbating conflicts, where
humanitarians intervened with the best moral and ethical intentions and principles but
in the end were arguably pivotal in prolonging suffering, a pertinent example being the
then ‘innovative’ humanitarian interventions in the secessionist war in
Biafra that ended 50 years ago and has been a milestone in re-thinking humanitarian
action

worldview
– where the suffering of strangers is a matter of concern, and a legitimate ground for
principled intervention, for everyone – that humanitarianism and human rights enjoy full
legitimacy. They are both morally grounded by the same ends, ends that have thrived under US-led
liberal order for four decades (reaching their zenith from 1991 to 2011). During this time, both humanitarianism and human rights have provided a seemingly non-political
(or perhaps ‘political’ not ‘Political’) outlet for religious and
secular activists, many from the left

management and child nutrition to illustrate how tracking devices have been used for
control and governance purposes. Section 4 offers an inventory of proposed aid uses
of wearables – the central issue here is not present or future uses but what
is imagined as possible, appropriate or useful interventions and
– crucially – for whom? Section 5 reflects on how wearables challenge
our basic understanding of aid as a gift, of who provides resources and of who
benefits, as

Introduction Despite seventy years of UN programme interventions, the need for global humanitarian
assistance has not been greater since the end of the Second World War ( UNHCR, 2016a ). In 2017, more than 201
million people living in 134 countries required humanitarian assistance, with a
record 68.5 million people forcibly displaced by violence and conflict ( Development Initiatives, 2018 ; UNHCR, 2017 ). The use of violence and
conflict by state and non-state actors towards innocent civilians is

the
decision to focus on a single case study (of humanitarian intervention in Somalia
since the 1990s) and to focus our activities on a workshop format. This approach, we
felt, would concentrate our discussions and make tangible the lessons learnt more
effectively than attempting to find answers to such far-reaching questions in a
global context. Somalia was selected because of its pivotal role in redefining
humanitarian aid in the post-Cold War era. The crisis in the